Discussing diverse aspects of the environmental history of South and Southeast Asia, from a variety of perspectives, it brings together leading experts from the fields of history, history of science, archaeology, geography and environmental studies, and covers a time span from 50,000 BC to the present. Spanning a geographical region from Peshawar on the North-West Frontier to the Maluku Islands in eastern Indonesia, this book tells the story of the highly complex relationship between people and their environment. Among a multitude of subjects it reports on the latest findings in settlement archaeology, the history of deforestation, climate change, the history of fishing, hunting and shikar, colonial science and forest management, indigenous plant knowledge, the history of famine, the impact of coalmining and the tragic story of India's tragic story of India's tribal communities.

Nature and the Orient is one of the most ambitious books in a field which is growing rapidly in relevance and popularity for the specialist as well as the general public, covering as it does a vast geographical, disciplinary and temporal span. Discussing diverse aspects of the environments history of South and Southeast Asia, it brings together reading experts from the fields of archaeology, history, history of science, geography and environmental studies, and covers a time span from 50,000 BC to the present.

This is a valuable collection of essays, particularly useful for the teaching at university level of a new imperial history which refuses to be blind to the often dire environmental consequences of european colonialism